[Mailman-Developers] Lock patches?

[John Viega]

On Sat, Jun 06, 1998 at 05:51:50AM -0500, Steve Spicklemire wrote:
> 
> Hi There,
> 
> I'm using mailman on NeXTStep. One of the problems I ran into
> was the non-functionality of lock file support on NeXTStep. Soooo....
> I cooked up a (more or less) satisfactory replacement. Would anyone
> else on the list be interested in the canges? Basically I create a
> normal file as the 'lock'. I create it with flags that require mailman
> to have exclusive write access to it.  If another mailman process is
> already using the file, the create fails. There is an optional
> 'timeout' period, so that a hung/dead process won't cut out all other
> mailman processes. Are there other platforms where file locking is a
> problem?

Steve,

The locking that we currently do definitely needs replacement.  It
doesn't work on FreeBSD, apparently.  If you've got a portable
solution, we'd love to have it.  And if you're interested in improving
the granularity of locking throughout the system, let us know, we'd
like that to happen as well :)

John